I moved the car with my eyes and it left me speechless

All reports from MWC 2024 in Barcelona

He Honor Magic 6 Pro It comes with a feature called Magic Capsule, which essentially allows you to view notifications without touching your phone. It’s a bit like Apple’s Dynamic Island, but with a catch.

Here you expand notifications without even touching your phone. You do this by operating the phone with your eyes. To display a function in MMC 2024Honor allowed the journalist DT in English, Prahar Khanna, start, stop and move the car with your eyes. And it was the craziest demo I saw at MWC.

Control your phone with your eyes

This is how Prakhar described it:

The Magic Capsule is essentially Honor’s version of Apple’s Dynamic Island. For example, if you order an Uber and a notification appears, you can look at your phone, which will expand the notification and give you more information. I can think of a few instances where this would be useful, such as when I’m eating and a text comes in, or I need to look at a message from a friend when my hands can’t touch the phone.

Honor demonstrated the feature by creating a demo in which it could move a car from a starting point up to 10 meters just by looking at the phone. The magic capsule requires you to calibrate your eyes, which is a fairly simple process. Five dots are displayed on the screen that you can examine one by one. And it’s ready to go in 30 seconds. I calibrated my eyes without taking off my glasses and switched to the car app.

There were four fields on the screen: start the engine, move forward, reverse and stop the engine. I looked at the starter for three seconds and the car started. I then looked at the Move Forward button and was amazed at how it registered my gaze to move the car within five seconds. For demonstration purposes only, it had to move 10 meters. All I could think was, “What the hell is this in the world of Harry Potter?” I pulled it back, turned off the engine and did it all over again, only to be incredibly surprised again.

This is incredibly cool, but I should make it clear that this is not a use case for the Magic Capsule, and it is not the future of driving. It’s an innovative idea to showcase a feature designed to make the phone’s interface more interactive.

Is this the future?

Although the Honor Magic 6 Pro debuted at MWC this year, the Magic Capsule feature is not available at launch. The device was previously released in China, so the eye tracking feature is tailored for East Asian eyes. Honor is still preparing it for global audiences. It will come to Magic 6 Pro via an update in the future.

The Honor Magic capsule works with both contact lenses and glasses. It doesn’t depend on eye color. I asked Honor if there was an indicator to let me know when the phone was looking at my face. The company says it doesn’t use the camera. Instead, it simply uses the ToF sensor to recognize your eyes and where they are looking on the screen. This worked for me and I was surprised when it recognized exactly where I was looking on the screen.

When I asked, the company told me that I didn’t have to worry about a stranger in public looking at my phone and accessing my notifications without my knowledge. The magic capsule activates after 1.8 seconds (this cannot be changed), which Honor says is the most reasonable time for eye contact based on her inner knowledge. This is more than just a casual glance, and only when you are consciously looking at the screen. This takes into account the shape of the eyes and eye movements.

But since it doesn’t scan your eye data, it’s not limited to just their eyes. For example, if you hand your phone to a friend to look at a photo and a notification comes in, they can probably access it by looking at it for 1.8 seconds. I’m just skeptical, but it’s likely that this will happen because you’re not using your biometrics. Instead, it is reflected from the rays of someone’s eyes, and it doesn’t matter who it is.

I like the fact that the Magic Capsule uses a process built into the device to operate. You don’t need an Internet connection to control your phone with your eyes. Honor says it’s working with numerous apps in China, but has yet to comment on which apps will be supported when they roll out globally. It will first appear on the Magic 6 Pro and will not be available on the Honor Magic V2 foldable phone as it lacks a ToF sensor. There is no word yet on compatibility with the Magic 5 Pro.

Moving a car from one place to another using your phone sounds quite simple, but when you do it with your eyes, it’s extraordinary. I say it again: this is not the intended use case, and it won’t be released to the general public, but this feature is impressively cool and I can’t wait to try it out when it arrives in the coming months. We don’t have a firm release date for the Magic Capsule yet, but it will be interesting to see how it fits into my daily usage scenarios. Currently, the only phone that receives it in the world is the Honor Magic 6 Pro for 1,299 euros.

From Barcelona, ​​originally in English. Prahar Khanna.